July 8, 2014

Update: SOLD
With heavy heart, I have decided to part with my 3 year old ultra portable, fun to have and absolute bliss to use laptop for travels (1.6 kgs only!).
We’re talking about ‘Shenron’ (Shenron, is the name of my laptop derived wish granting dragon of Dragon Ball Series; Yes, I name my gadgets, problem? :D).

The Cheezy Stuff:

Shenron is an HP DM1-Z, which I bought jumping with joy when the AMD APU Fusion Zacate platform blasted performance without eating battery life was released, 3 years ago.

It was and is still the best 11.6 inch laptop available, other than well MacBook Air… or it probably beats air in few areas easily (unless if you’re an apple fanboy).

This is a special model of dm1-z, which is equipped with a 7200 rpm speed hard drive (no other models of dm1-z or even other 11.6 laptops came with 7200 rpm to reduce cost.) Even my new 14” laptop has only a 5400 rpm harddrive, imagine that! 🙂

What’s EXTRA for you!

I have a NEW original battery on this(the battery cover is still on), which I purchased for INR 6500 after the stock one died.

I have only discharged the battery to 10% less than 25-30 times and just for keeping it maintained or calibrated. So basically you have ton of life left on it. (Unless you don’t know how to maintain a laptop battery that is 😉 )

DM1 has been known for its long battery life. The 6 cell battery, 65 W adapter .. this has got juice to give you 9+ hr of idle backup time and usage time of about 5.5 hrs (I’ve tested this with both the stock and this new battery).

It also has a RAM upgrade by another 4GB stick, so that makes it a 6GB RAM fucking awesome machine! 🙂 [ Extra chargeable for the 4GB stick, read at bottom of the post ]

Also I am meticulous about stuff, so I maintained the laptop pretty well, including I’ve got it cleaned twice inside out for dust, cleaned heat sinks, the bridges, the keyboard, replaced thermal paste with new improved ones so that it contributes to cooler running and better throughput.

For buying my laptop, you get the new battery (so you’re not buying old battery which doesn’t have life left), and can opt to buy the extra 4GB of RAM at lower than market price from me. (Else I can totally use the extra ram on my new laptop)

Oh look, I love the almost 180 deg tilt!

Why I’m being cruel :

The laptop certainly didn’t deserve to go away from me so soon. I love it, it’s beautiful, thin, super portable and I’ve used it for my game design, made video games on it for almost 1.5 yrs now, running VMWare, Virtualbox, playing HD videos, playing games, editing videos.

I could still happily keep using it. It’s got the power I need, it feels very happy to carry around while travelling, and its got long battery life.

However, I have a new 14” laptop which I bought for one of my programmers and unfortunately we decided he should leave.

Now that leaves me with 2 laptops, and the new one has been lying in shelf. It has way less battery life (3 cell) when compared to the one I’m selling away. And keeping it in shelf means unused battery, means screwing it up.

The only +ve of it above this laptop is that it has 14” screen and I thought, for someone who writes games for a living I do need a bigger screen.

Shut Up and Take my money!

I am currently living in Hyderabad, India and I’m here still for the next 20 days.
So if you live here, or even if you live in another state but have the means to get this laptop to you (I’m not delivering/posting) and want this baby to be yours, then do email me at
das (dot) srikrishna (at) gmail (dot) com
You’ll have to give me 2 days time to back up my data to the other machine. I’m still using this, and infact writing this blog post from it.

It came preloaded with Win 7 home, but I’ve used Linux on it for 2.5 yrs and using Windows 8.1 since 0.5 yrs.
I can either install ubuntu linux for you or give you without OS (since the windows 8.1 is licensed to my company), however if you have a windows 7, you can happily use the product key which is written underneath the battery compartment… so you have a genuine windows license. 🙂

I spent INR 26,000 on laptop, and INR 6500 on new battery, INR 500 for matt finish screen protector.
Monetarily that brings the price of this beautiful machine to INR 33,000
Not to forget tons of time for careful handling and love!

I’d like to let go of this lovely hardware for just INR 15,000 only. (that’s less price than your 10.1 inch slow netbooks of these days)

The extra stick of 4GB RAM, 1333 Mhz costed me INR 3100 which you can opt to buy for INR 2,200, if not I can give it away to someone else or just use it in my other laptop.

Like this:

September 5, 2008

Not receiving any call from the service center, I decided to walk-in and pick up my laptop.
To my surprise, they hadn’t tried any remedy / work-around for the heating issue. Upon asking the reason I was shown a similar model running windowsXP (some customer’s) which was generating almost the same heat.

insect backpack

The difference was that it was running for a long amount of time (probably being tested for some other defect) and my laptop would reach that temperature within few minutes (without any apps running).
This seems no make no difference to the tech guys there.

I requested them to open the laptop, check for thermal paste and clean the dust on the fan if possible. They should have done that already (what if the customer isn’t aware of these things!); I am glad they didn’t turn down my request.

By this time my laptop keypad had turned into some sort of gray color, thanks to the dust at the service center.
I had given my side-carry bag(the one that came with the laptop); absolutely new and never used earlier (I always use my insect backpack), guess what, I couldn’t recognise the bag at first look. It looked as if it was dragged on the floor.

Like this:

September 3, 2008

My screen was replaced and tested for just 4 hours at an acer authorised service center.
Makes me wonder why it took 9 days and 5 reminder calls to get my laptop back; seems quite long considering that it is a carry-in warranty and not a home delivery too. Nine days! sigh.

I hopped back home in joy; hoping that troubles are over and getting eager to work. I was baffled the very moment unpacked my lappie from the box. Reason – two uneven surfaces near the battery compartment. It looked as if they’ve used some tools like screwdriver to lift the compartment. I called up the service center and they denied opening the compartment. According to them they had replaced only the LCD and that doesn’t require opening any of the compartments.
I never knew acer laptop compartment seals could self break!

I checked the BIOS setup and found that time, date, boot sequence and few other options were changed. Why would these require change if they were servicing it for display issue?
Anyway, I had to complete my pending tasks. I worked on the laptop for about 30 minutes and here it is – A new problem. The left side of the keyboard was warmer than it used to be. I checked the ventilation slots and it was blowing hot air at high speed. Never before was the laptop so hot. I could smell hot lead at the ventilation slots.

I installed lm_sensors, and it showed 60 C for CPU temperature. That’s real crazy considering the fact that it rained and room temperature was cool, it was night time and moreover I had the room fan on at the highest speed. On top of all these I had a laptop cooling pad. Boy, this is not good.

I logged a new support request with the help of acer tech support and took the laptop back to the same authorised dealer/service center. I showed them the broken compartment seals; only then they admitted opening it for checking internal components. They have taken in the laptop and promised 4 days for problem resolution (the same way they did the last time, may be 4==9).
Before leaving, I asked them if their engineers worked on linux too (my lappie has mandriva linux). They nodded and claimed that they know it all.

Next day I was waiting for their call. They told me they would notify if the hardware needs to be replaced. It was almost evening and impatiently I gave them a call to inquire status. Surprisingly, they didn’t check it because my laptop didn’t have WindowsXP!! Hello, this is a linux laptop. Acer shipped it with linpus linux and your tech support doesn’t work on linux! It was just yesterday you claimed that they know it all.
I then explained the steps to go to my 3rd workspace in KDE, where I had gkrellm monitoring the CPU load and temperature. If they would have admitted not knowing gnu/linux when I gave in the laptop, I’d have showed them and given a small tutorial also (FOR FREE).

So, again I am on a waiting mode for their call.
Hardware vendors who claim to support GNU/Linux should try to walk the talk.

Like this:

August 21, 2008

I bought a new acer 4315 laptop this April; started using from Mid-may since I already had compaq v3000 from one of my clients.
May, June, July passed happily, but things started heating up in August (yeah this month).

I suddenly notice my laptop getting warmer at the left side of keyboard. Losing no time I purchased a cooling base for my lappie (yeah I love my laptop). The cooling base does a wonderful job, though I still feel that the left side of keyboard is warmer than the right; it is quite less than former heat.
Few days pass by, and just when I was beginning to feel comfortable again, I notice this weird flicker on my screen! (2 days ago.) For a moment I thought it could be a power surge, but then I realized I was running on battery.

To describe the flicker is quite hard, its like very thin vertical multicolored lines on your screen for fraction of a second.
This happened twice that day and again twice next day.

Worse was today. Happened 5 times and the fifth time the screen went black for a second. Fifth flicker today was long; about 2 seconds. My heart almost stopped.
I know acer service center closes at 17:30 IST and there is no use calling them now. Probably will get an auto responder.

I remember that I couldn’t register my purchase on acer site because it wouldn’t open the calendar in one of the form fields on firefox. I tried my luck again today but no use.
(For hasty suggester:
1. I know acer.co.in is written is an asp.NET content written in C#
2. I have Java Runtime and Java browser plugin (1.5 on PC and 1.6 on laptop); I’ve tried registering from both.
3. If you think I should use Microsoft Internet Explorer to do it – Please buy me an original Windows.
4. I dont want IE running on my GNU/Linux distro. )

Let me carry-in my lappie to their service center and may be they can help without blaming it on GNU/Linux.
(Oh yes, I’ve heard of many support centers that start blaming on whatever they don’t/don’t want to understand.)